Happy New Year My Friends

(source for graphic: http://datacommunication2011.blogspot.com/2011/12/merry-christmas-happy-new-year-2012.html)

For those of you who are going out partying tonight, I wish you a safe and fabulous new year's eve, and those of you who are having a more sedate nye, enjoy your night as well.

I really hope that 2012 is an excellent year for you and that at least some of your dreams come true!

And I hope that you will continue to read and enjoy Mutterings from Maryville!!

See you next year!

Kev

New Year's eve-eve

Steve and I picked up my brother, Brett, from Coolangatta airport yesterday afternoon for his first ever stay at Maryville@Larnook. Our friend, Keith, from Sydney also came over for the night (Keith is up visiting for the Tropical Fruits Dance Party, which we are all attending). Anyway, we had a lovely dinner of slow roasted pork belly (the first time I had attempted cooking it - was delicious) and a Thai beef salad washed down by lots of chardonnay, and followed of course, by Steve's desserts.
Yep, a cardie on 31 December - who could have thought. The last day of the year dawned cool and quite wet, although it seems to be clearing up now, as I sit and type this at 5.30pm. We all headed down to Kyogle for our weekly shopping and rounded it off with brunch at the Box and Dice Cafe.
And these are out 'party herbs' that Steve and I bought from the very fun guy at the Happy High Herbs shop in Uki that we will be using to enhance our partying at tonight's Tropical Fruits NYE danceparty 'Tribal'. All legal, all based on bits of plant. And all beginning with the letter 'e'...how coincidental. So we have empathy to feel all lovey-dovey, everything is beautiful kinda feeling; energy to well, give us energy; eclipse to give us a bit of an edge; and entropy to help us come down the following day. I can't be sceptical, I have to believe they will work, otherwise, they won't.

Rainfall stats 2011

January 309

February 172

March 129.5

April 252.5

May 79

June 103.5

July 43.5

August 160.5

September 13.5 (very dry month)

October 217

November 155.5

December 141

Total 2011 1776.5

Total 2010 1697

Total 2009 1500

The vexed question of nature

I'm reading Rambunctious Garden, Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World by Emma Marris at the moment, and as I was reading it on the day bed, I was compelled to think of the inconsistent ways I think about exotic/introduced/feral species. I'd love to remove most of the slash pines that have been planted as wind breaks on our property because I see them as an unwelcome European element in an otherwise 'Australian' landscape.

But, immediately I am vulnerable to an attack led by 'well just what is an 'Australian' landscape, anyway? And here I am overlooking gardens (gardens that we have planted) with frangipani and heliconia and exotic gingers, and I look at the vege gardens (oh how Aussie) and I see plants from South America and southern Europe.

And then I think back to how wonderful it is to see the yellow tailed black cockatoos chewing their way through the pine cones on those slash pines I'd like to banish...

Marris' argument is that the notion of pristine nature doesn't exist and probably never did, but that it is very much a product of a Western imagination. For Marris, contemporary nature is a hybrid of the wild with the managed and that a preoccupation with 'pristine wilderness' might be good for the spirit but not so good for the global ecology.

And then my mind turns to the cane toad and how we have no black snakes because of it. And the various weeds that I do battle with...and I put my book down and have a sleep.

Boxing Night at Larnook

Steve and I had a wonderful couple of days in Newcastle between Xmas Eve and home again on Boxing Day. It was lovely to spend time with family and friends and it was the first Xmas we had in Newcastle since moving up here, so it was high time we had a very Newcastle Xmas. Then, our friends, Glen, John and Julie and Lou arrived towards the end of yesterday for a very laid back but enjoyable dinner. Although desserts are always an important feature at our dinners, we didn't actually commence with dessert as this post might suggest but anyway here they are: Steve's famous ice cream slice and sherry log and a locally made Xmas pudding.
I marinated some green banana prawns in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, orange juice and garlic and ginger and bbq'd them... very tasty
a fabulous salad that Julie created
and here we are at the table: Glen, John, Steve, Julie and Lou
and me substituting for Glen in this pic.

poached chicken salad with grilled haloumi

A simple but rather delicious and healthy lunch that I put together last Friday: poached chicken breast in water and 1 cup of chardonnay; then cooled and sliced; made a salad using lettuce, avocado, tomatoes from our garden, spring onion, mango. Grilled some haloumi cheese and arranged strips over the top and added some almost hard boiled eggs (boiled for 3.5 minutes, just nice and soft, almost gooey). Very tasty.

2 dead snakes on the Cawongla Road this morning

With the appalling weather we've been having it's no surprise that snakes are being drawn to the warmth that bitumen roads provide them. And of course, that means that they are easily run over, either accidentally or on purpose. I suspect there's a fair bit of the latter that happens up here. So the death toll this morning as we drove down the valley to work was 2 snakes: a gravid eastern small-eyed snake, with the most beautiful pink belly, and a large eastern brown snake. This was surprising as it must have been killed this morning prior to 7.25am which is the time we drove past it. The poor thing must have been run over virtually as soon as it had begun basking on the road.

It's interesting that I've seen two dead browns in the space of a few days - usually I see dead browns in early spring when they are moving around looking for mates. By December, it's usually hot every day and so they don't need to hang around the roads trying to soak up as much warmth as they can.

I argue, with my colleague, Nancy Cushing, in Snake Bitten, that there was a general angst about snakes operating in Australia up until the 70s. I think that angst still exists in the country. I think I've written before about the 'snake netting' that used to be attached to the bottom of our house in the ridiculous belief you could keep snakes out from under the house; then there were the bottles of 'snake repellant' that the local pet shop used to sell (I haven't seen these lately); and most recently, there were ads in one of the free farmer magazines that get poked in our letterbox, featuring a snake repelling device that you plug in to the power and it emits some kind of anti-snake sound waves or something. Lordie.

Farewell to Cal

We drove Cal up to Brisbane airport on Saturday for his 1420 departure to New Caledonia, where he is spending about 6 weeks with his friend, Tomas, who lives there and another friend, Rosin, who is flying in from the UK. Cal emailed us yesterday to day he'd already seen two sharks and a sea snake and a myriad of fantastically coloured fish. He will be happy! Cal comes back for a few days sometime in January with another friend of his, Margo, before he heads back down south. We are hoping to join up with him in Darwin in June or July next year.

On the way back home, we called in at Ikea, where Steve bought some natty little spice racks. One thing I don't understand is the fact that people buy plants at Ikea. I mean, really. We also called into a rather large pet shop at Nerang, where I bought a larger tank to house my rapidly growing rough-scaled pythons, as well as some native fish - four striped rainbow fish and a small catfish, for the pond in the deck.

DoR Brown Snake, Martins Rd

Note to me: dead brown snake, about a metre long, on road just in front of our letterbox on Friday 9 December. Closest brown snake to the property - what a shame it had been killed.

some more vegies and hydrangeas

Our hydrangeas are exploding into mauves and blues at the moment and they are looking better than they ever have (a result I think of good fertilizing just before the rains hit 6-8 weeks ago). Unfortunately, the pics don't do justice to the intensity of the colour of these flowers but I'm sure you get the idea.
They have grown so well that they have almost reached the height of the guttering. We'll let them keep growing and flowering but will then trim them right back at the end of summer.
And, as I show in the post below, we've got lots of vegies happening now. These are cucumber....
and these are the vege gardens we built a couple of months ago, bursting with various heirloom variety tomatoes, okra, basil, eggplant, chard, lettuce and other goodies

Garden delights

Some of you feel that there have been too many snake pics of late ;-) so here's some pics of some of our vegies....this is some kind of squash that is loving the wetter weather
and a rather large zucchini.....time to stuff it I think
and some kind of yellow squash thing
and a fine crop of spring onions
and a tree full of finger limes, which are a native species of citrus....

The Cal Tree

We wanted Cal to select and plant a tree so this could become his tree which continues to grow and do well here at Larnook (as a number of other friends have done). So we visited Daley's Nursery at Kyogle a week or so ago and selected this fine Illawarra Flame Tree, which has been grafted on to root stock and will flower in three years rather than the usual 6. We planted it, along with some other native trees, along the fence line in the bottom paddock. Here's Cal beginning to dig the hole.
And here he is with it nicely planted, fertilized and watered. The rain that we have been having up here would have done it the wold of good and I checked it out today as I mowed this paddock and it was looking very healthy. Hopefully it will flourish.

New water tank in

As regular readers of this blog would know, the water tank that sits up behind the mango trees, and is filled with water from our bore, has been in a rather sorry state for a couple of years. The crack in the cement tank split a apart about 18 months ago and the plastic/vinyl liner has been splitting and leaking. It was time to get a new tank. So Steve and Cal prepared the base a couple of weeks ago, digging out and levelling a spot adjacent to the old tank.
Here is the nicely finished level spot, which ultimately had to have a cement edge to one side of it to stop the road base from washing out.
And this is our new tank, sitting on its pad and waiting to be hooked up to the water pipe. Hopefully Steve will be able to sort out the various pipes and soon we'll be filling it up with sweet bore water.

Wedgetail on the way to work

I left home this morning about 6.45 when the morning was just starting to wake. The weather has been well, wet and cool, and nothing like it should be, but the one good thing is that the countryside is so, so, green. Driving along Cawongla Road as it snaked its way down the valley, following Leycester Creek, was a joy. Made even better when I saw one of the local pair of wedge tailed eagles, soaring around, low to the ground, looking for prey.

The poincianas are now bursting into their vibrant reddy-orange flowers which add so much colour to the streets in Lismore.

We had a lovely night last night...I cooked a lamb roast with veges, but before dinner, Steve, Cal and I soaked in the hot tub in a light rain with a bottle of bubbly. Cal had made a delicious pear and almond cake (from a recipe book by noted chef, belinda Jeffery, who lives at mullum - more about her and her cook book in another posting), which was delicious.

We take Cal up to Brisbane airport tomorrow (Saturday) for his departure to New Caledonia where he will stay for a month or so with friends. Then he'll fly back to Brisbane and come and visit us again - as a mate, not a HelpXer, before setting off back south towards Sydney.

Once again, to get the best out of the pics, you need to click on them to enlarge them. Last night Cal and I headed off to Mt Nardi, in the Nightcap National Park, about ten minutes north of Nimbin, to look for any snakes and other reptiles which might come out to soak up the warmth in the road. Our first find for the evening was this baby carpet python on Stony Chute Road, about ten minutes from our place. Very cute.
We then drove through Nimbin and up towards Mt Nardi. About ten minutes before Mt Nardi we encountered this quite large blind snake, probably Rhamphotyphlops proxima. It was certainly the largest blind snake (they eat bulldog ants's eggs and larvae) that I had ever seen. Very smelly too, it emitted a rather pungent aroma in retaliation to our handling it.
Then, once we were at the trailhead, we encountered three leaf tailed geckos, about 18cm - 20 cm long - absolute beauties..head down on the walls of a toilet building, waiting for some unwary spider or insect.
You can see why they are called leaf-tails, can't you.
Our final find for the evening was on the way home, again on Stony Chute Road - a lovely sub-adult pink tongued skink, was moving across the road. Beautiful, if bitey, skink. Thanks to Cal for the images and company.